Whatever Happened to All Those Dealers

Feature Article from Hemmings Classic Car

Recently I visited my local Studebaker/AMC dealer. I'm not really in the market for a new car right now, but I like to stay in tune with the market. It goes with the job. I'll admit right up front the dealer didn't have a single new Studebaker on the lot. I'll guess they haven't had any since about mid-1966. They had no American Motors vehicles either-they received their last shipment of AMC cars years ago. But Milford Jeep is a new car dealer and their lot was filled with new Jeep Wranglers, Libertys and Grand Cherokees. When I was a snot-nosed little kid, they had new Studebakers in the showroom. After Studebaker left the car business, the dealer stayed in business selling Jeeps and later added the AMC car line. Like many dealers who handled independent makes back then, they also sold gasoline, and the rows of gas pumps out front were a big help in paying the bills. Although the owner was sometimes pressured by factory reps to modernize the place and get rid of the pumps, holding onto them must have been a pretty good idea because this dealership has outlasted many Big Three and import dealers.
The point is that Milford Jeep on U.S. Route 1 in Milford, Connecticut, is a survivor. And they're part of the answer to a question someone asked me earlier this year: "Where did all the dealers go when the independent car companies went out of business?"
It's a good question. After all, the independent brands had a lot of dealers. Willys Motors still had about 3,000 dealers in 1963 and many of them were former Kaiser-Frazer dealers who turned to Willys when Kaiser-Frazer ended car production. After Nash and Hudson production ended in 1957, most of their dealers continued on as Rambler dealers, and many of those later evolved into AMC dealers. When AMC was being sold to Chrysler in 1987, it claimed it had 1,466 AMC, Jeep and Renault dealers. If we follow one string, we can see that some Kaiser-Frazer dealers became Willys-Jeep dealers, then Kaiser-Jeep dealers and then AMC-Jeep dealers after AMC bought Jeep. Some of these, like Milford Jeep, have survived to the present era.
Of course, not every dealer followed that route. After Checker ceased production in 1982, our local Checker dealer, Libby's, didn't add another car line. They simply continued to sell motorcycles as they had for years.
The big surprise is how many former independent-brand dealers went on to enjoy great success selling other cars. Truthfully, I doubt that several of today's better-known import brands would have done nearly as well as they have if it weren't for some excellent former independent dealers that signed on before imports were hot. A good example is the Boch family of automobile dealerships in Massachusetts. During 2005, Boch Honda on U.S. Route 1 in Norwood, Massachusetts, billed itself as the #1 Honda dealer in the USA. Next door is Boch Toyota, which is advertised as the #2 Toyota dealer in the USA. The Boch family formerly operated a Nash dealership, which later became a Rambler store. According to sources, Boch Rambler was once the largest Rambler dealer in the world.
Travel out to Detroit, and on Cass Avenue you can visit Dalgleish Cadillac-Olds, a successful GM dealership that goes back a long time. But they didn't always operate under the current name. Back in the early 1950s, the business was called Charlie's Nash, named for owner Charlie Dalgleish, and for a time, Charlie's Nash was the biggest Nash dealer in the world. I sat with Charlie's son Doug, the current owner, a couple of years ago, listening as he reminisced about when Nash executives George Romney and George Mason, and designer Pinin Farina visited his store. Talk about great memories!
Perhaps the most successful former independent dealer is Jim Moran, who helped make Toyota a success in America. Moran founded JM Family Enterprises which owns, among other things, Southeast Toyota Distributors, the world's largest privately owned distributor of Toyota vehicles. AMC's Roy D. Chapin Jr. told me that in the 1940s and 1950s Moran operated the largest Hudson dealership in America.
The AMC dealership where I sold cars back in the 1970s and 1980s, Stahl's AMC-Jeep in Derby, Connecticut, was formerly a Hudson dealer. As a matter of fact, I remember that a beautiful Hudson clock still hung on the wall behind the bookkeeper's desk as recently as 1985. The clock wasn't there for sentimental reasons, it was there because the dealer was extremely frugal. He figured if a clock still worked, why buy a new one? I think the reason we never got an AMC clock was because the Hudson clock never broke. The building houses a Dodge dealership now.
Many Studebaker dealers gave up on the car business in the mid-1960s. But because of a deal Studebaker-Packard had made in the mid-1950s, some S-P dealers became Mercedes-Benz dealers. One small part of the deal made by Curtiss Wright's Roy Hurley to manage Studebaker-Packard was an agreement that qualified Studebaker-Packard dealers would sell and service Mercedes-Benz products. Some did just that, adding the prestigious (though slow-selling) luxury brand to their showrooms. So, when Studebakers were no longer being produced some dealers continued on as Mercedes-Benz dealers. Others sold used cars, and a few switched to AMC. Milford Jeep had an AMC franchise for a while in the 1980s, and as an AMC salesman a few towns over, I sometimes competed with the current owner of Milford Jeep.
So where did all the independent dealers go? Well, many of them are still out there.

This article originally appeared in the December, 2005 issue of Hemmings Classic Car.